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By Root 1250 0

Kido’s contemporary diary does not record Hirohito’s statements in such detail; that, whatever Hirohito said on 7 and 8 August, he nevertheless did not accept the Potsdam Declaration, on which the Americans had insisted; and that, despite the high-level meetings that quickly followed, ‘not a single senior official... changed his prior stand on war termination after the atomic bombing’, as Leon Sigal has written. One may quibble over this judgment—after all, no single senior official mattered as much as the Emperor, and, however Kido may have elaborated on his and Togo’s conversations with him, there can be no doubt that Hirohito’s desire to end the war had significantly increased after Hiroshima had been bombed— but only slightly, for it represents the combined wisdom of historians who have studied the Japanese record most recently and carefully. The more interesting question concerns what one does with this conclusion. It is possible to argue that, because the first atomic bomb did not convince the Japanese to surrender, it was necessary to add to the shock by continuing to drop atomic bombs until they agreed to do so. It took ten plagues to compel the Egyptian Pharoah to agree to the exodus of Jews; perhaps it would require all the bombs the United States could muster to break the will of the Emperor. On the other hand, one could as plausibly argue that the bomb, despite the singular destruction and mayhem it caused, was not and would never be the war-winning weapon. To a leadership determined to sacrifice everything to defend the homeland, and to a populace already exhausted beyond shock by the experience or imminence of incendiary bombing, the annihilation of thousands of people at once was not enough to break Japan’s resolve to fight on.42

9. Soviet entry and the bombing of Nagasaki

It is, in any case, very difficult to disaggregate the effect of the Hiroshima bombing from the impact of two other profound shocks that soon followed in its train. First, and despite his longstanding pessimism that his government’s overtures to the Soviets would amount to anything, Ambassador Sato was nevertheless stunned when Foreign Minister Molotov summoned him, at 5.00 p.m. Moscow time on 8 August, to inform him that, ‘as of August 9, the Soviet Union will consider itself in a state of war with Japan’. The declaration fulfilled the promise Stalin had made to Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta six months earlier. That it came despite the Soviets not yet having got from China a satisfactory territorial agreement suggests that its timing, if not its fact, was in part determined by the bombing of Hiroshima. Stalin had apparently spent much of the previous day discussing the bomb with advisers. James Byrnes, the American Secretary of State, had hoped the bombs would end the war with Japan short of the Russians getting ‘too much in on the kill’, but the bombing may have moved Stalin to act more quickly than he might otherwise have done. And Molotov’s statement to Sato that the declaration would take hold on the 9th was mendacious: it turned out Molotov was referring to the time at the front. Thus, just after midnight Trans-Baikal time—it was 6.10 in the evening of 8 August in Moscow—Soviet troops crossed into Manchuria in force and on several fronts at once. They surprised the Japanese Kwantung Army, which was understrength and demoralized, and drove hard toward the cities of Changchun, Mukden, Harbin, and Kirin. Another force attacked Korea. Some Japanese units resisted, while others withdrew or simply melted away.43

As he was driven away from the Kremlin after his stark meeting with Molotov, Sato told his embassy secretary, ‘The inevitable has now arrived.’ Prime Minister Suzuki said much the same thing when he learned of the Soviet declaration at dawn on the 9th. Togo and leading foreign ministry officials were already awake and discussing the new crisis; they quickly resolved that Japan would have to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Togo called on Yonai, another of the Big Six, who agreed that the time had come to bow to the inevitable.